A war without winners

Who started it? Who won it? What has it changed? These are the questions which demand answers as wars end and they are not easy ones. As to the first, it seems unlikely that Hizbullah staged its initial attack, kidnapping Israeli soldiers, with the intention of precipitating a confrontation on the scale which ensued.

It may have thought it could relieve pressure on Hamas in the occupied territories, or at least offer them a symbolic gesture of support, enduring some increased bombardment while making the Israelis jump through hoops to get their captured soldiers back.

It also seems unlikely that Iran and Syria, interested although they always are in harassing Israel, wanted a real showdown in southern Lebanon at this moment. It was Israel, then, which wanted a showdown, which sensed an opportunity to remove or greatly reduce the threat represented by Hizbullah and to deal a blow to its strategic rival in the region, Iran.

Has it succeeded - or rather, will it succeed, bearing in mind that it looks as though Israel plans to continue fighting in spite of the ceasefire agreement reached over the weekend? Hizbullah has been damaged, but not destroyed. It has exacted a toll in Israeli military casualties and continues to pour rockets on to Israeli towns and villages.

That is not an achievement of which it should be proud, but it is an achievement of sorts none the less. Is Hizbullah, then, the winner, able to split the Lebanese cabinet yesterday on a ceasefire demand for its disarmament? Not in any clear way. Its casualties cannot yet be accurately counted but they will be high. Many of its tunnels and fortifications have been discovered and blasted to pieces and its stockpiles of missiles and other munitions largely expended.

Yet these are not its most serious problems. Lebanon's Christian and Sunni communities, outraged by Israel's assault on their country, have shown solidarity with Hizbullah as the fighting has gone on. But there has also been anger and that is likely to become more evident in the aftermath of the war.

The even more fundamental issue for Hizbullah is its relationship with its own Shia constituency, a relationship built in part on a promise to protect and sustain. The Hizbullah welfare state lies in ruins amid the more general wreckage of the southern economy.

Where to find the huge sums of money, even with help from Iran, to rebuild these structures ? And, if the reconstruction of the south is done in part by others, by the Lebanese central government, the Europeans, and international agencies, so the lines of patronage and control will become less clear, a fact that carries with it important political implications.

That is only one aspect of the way in which the environment in which Hizbullah operates will become less easy for them to dominate. There will be other armed players, in the shape of the Lebanese regular army, even if this is full of sympathetic Shia, and of the French-led international force.

Amal, the other big Shia party, may begin to play a larger role. France's entry on to the stage will, meanwhile, put a power which has forged new links with Iran during this crisis on the ground in the Lebanon.

That is one of the factors which will have to be weighed by Hizbullah and by its allies in Damascus and Tehran, in considering the future use of the military capacity which Hizbullah has retained and will certainly rebuild. It will, it may be speculated, be harder for Hizbullah to resort to force. Yet the pitiful irony of the situation is that this process of narrowing the movement's military options was, for a variety of reasons, already under way.

This was a war which should never have happened and which should stop now. It does not need an even more tragic, ceasefire-breaking, final phase of the kind which Israeli military plans may still entail and which will prove no more successful than what has gone before.

(The Guardian)